On Immunity

At a time when hysteria both for and against vaccines seems to be at an all-time high, I was educated (inoculated?) by Eula Biss's extended essay, to understand that such feelings have a long and far-reaching history. They touch on themes of war, immigration, poverty, and the troubled relations between our minds and bodies, which allow us to swim in a sea of false ideas just as we bear a weight of microbes that are (or are they?) “not us.”

Humans are fragile and fearful creatures. It increasingly seems to me that our fears and concerns for our bodies mask the even greater threats that reside in our inner lives and souls, but those are threats we cannot so easily see and control. Instead, we obsess about a physical world that is already in the process of dying. We are encouraged to equate health and life with the survival of the body. But will this end up being a metaphor, one that we need to learn to read, or perish out of literalism?

While wondering about this question, one can read Biss's thoughtful, measured and eloquent meditations on life, motherhood, science, and metaphors, which concludes “However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other's environment. Immunity is a shared space – a garden we tend together.” I'm grateful for her help in thinking both more clearly and more artistically about the fears that plague our common mind today.